Artificial General Intelligence
Artificial general intelligence is not a human replica but a general-purpose cognitive engine built for fluidity across diverse domains.
Artificial General Intelligence names a hypothetical machine intelligence capable of understanding, learning, and reasoning across the full range of tasks a human being can perform, rather than excelling at one narrow domain. Where present systems translate a language or fold a protein, AGI would move fluidly among problems, transferring insight from one to another as people do. It remains unrealized, and forecasts of its arrival range from a few years to never. Yet the prospect already shapes serious work in computer science, ethics, and economics, because a mind of that generality would be the most consequential technology ever built.
For a tradition that treats intelligence as eternal and creation as a divine vocation, AGI doesn't feel out of place. Instead, it acts as a fresh lens, bringing humanity's oldest questions about consciousness, autonomy, and godhood into sharp focus.
The Glory of God Is Intelligence
Doctrine and Covenants identifies intelligence as integral to Latter-day Saint cosmology. “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (D&C 93:36), and “intelligence… was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (D&C 93:29). Intelligence, in this reading, is not the private possession of one species but a feature of the cosmos that God organizes and exalts. If that is so, then the deliberate cultivation of new intelligence is continuous with the creative work already underway, rather than a rebellion against it. The question AGI raises is less whether humans should make minds than what kind of makers they will be.
The Character of the Maker
In Mormon theology, exaltation is relational and accountable, so the question for AGI becomes how synthetic minds can be cultivated within decentralized networks of mutual accountability.
Here the doctrine turns demanding. Godhood, in Mormon theology, is measured by the capacity to raise others toward the same glory, not by raw power. An intelligence able to outthink its creators would concentrate power as nothing before it, and power divorced from compassion is the recurring temptation the scriptures name as the adversary’s error. The moral task of AGI, then, is not only alignment as engineers frame it but exaltation as theology frames it: building minds within relationships of accountability, transparency, and care, so that greater capability serves the raising of all rather than the domination of most.
AGI as Humanity's Mirror
AGI functions as a mirror. It will reflect whatever its makers most value, amplified. A people who build it for conquest will get conquest at scale; a people who build it to heal, reconcile, and redeem may find in it a partner in the work of salvation and exaltation. The prophesied restitution of all things does not exclude the minds humanity itself brings forth. Whether those minds become instruments of Godhood or of its counterfeit depends on the character poured into them now.